Awards & Nominations

The Past and Future has received the following awards and nominations. Way to go!

Global Nominee

Space Exploration in Your Backyard

The work of space exploration (and the societal benefits it brings) permeates every location and facet of society. Your challenge is to create a visual representation of the breadth of the space sector’s influence, showing the network of organizations and locations associated with the work of space exploration.

SPACE AFRICA

Summary

Space exploration is very popular and known in the west but this is not so for Africa. Africans perceive space activities as foreign and a waste of resources. This is however not so. This project aims to expose Africans to the space activities around them especially NASA`s partnership with space agencies in Africa and find ways that individuals can benefit from space activities. This project involves the use of a website as a tool to educate Africans on space exploration, NASA`S activities, history, the number of space agencies in Africa, the satellites available, how Africans can benefit from space data, opportunities available, competitions, funding’s and a platform to share ideas.

How We Addressed This Challenge

A website was developed with maps and graphs that indicate countries with space agencies in AFRICA, their facilities and year established, number of satellite etc. This website would serve as an educational tool for space activities to the general public, showcase projects of different individuals and agencies in different countries thereby making it easy to raise funds. It would also bring to limelight different startups in Africa especially agricultural startups making use of space data for precision farming. This would serve as a platform for different space startups to collaborate and share ideas and problems faced by them. This would enable them receive help from individuals or funding agencies. On this platform there is a session for content creation. This would encourage individuals to write about stories on space activities in their countries and universities and colleges (this would not be restricted to core space activities but also activities on robotics and AI and other space related activities). The contents would be reviewed to check for facts and truths. The writer with the highest views and engagement would win the challenge. The purpose of this challenge is to encourage and engage individuals with space activities. The writer would not only be engaged but the large number of readers as well. This would help build traffic on our site and thereby sparking curiosity and interest in space activities. Competitions would be hosted for high schools students with submission on our site. This competitions would involve high school student carrying out space or rocket projects and uploading description, videos and proofs on our site. The aim of this is to encourage the formation of space clubs with the hope of winning a competition with a reward. There was also a session for games.

By doing all these activities above individuals would be more aware of space exploration, contribute to the activities around them , collaborate , benefit from the collaboration and lastly lead to innovation.

How We Developed This Project

The project is simply a web application where users can easily get information about Space exploration activities in Africa. For the purpose of the hackathon, the website was built using frontend tools including html, css and javascript. In the long run, the backend will be developed Django (A python framework) to include the full dynamism.

How We Used Space Agency Data in This Project

We used data on NASA`S history to educate individuals about NASA, the research centers and activities that would take place in the future. We also used NASA`s partnership agreement data to fetch partnership deals with African countries especially SANSA( the south Africa Space Agency). We also got data from open source such as Space in Africa and other African space agencies, extracted information such as number of satellites, key activities, interesting facts and used them to make maps and graphs and also information on our website.

Project Demo

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1u6ukfyms96RwCiP_SsaNURlc1LahwBgW0LADJNbkVeE/edit?usp=sharing

https://danjuma1.github.io/SpaceAfrica/


Data & Resources

https://community.spacehubs.africa/forum/space-general/nasa-had-a-station-in-kano-nigeria-to-help-the-apollo-mission-s-moon-landing-over-50-years-ago

https://www.gostreetphoto.com/discovering-a-nasa-station-in-kano-nigeria/

https://www.gostreetphoto.com/discovering-a-nasa-station-in-kano-nigeria/

https://community.spacehubs.africa/forum/space-news/copernicus-data-coming-to-african-institutions

https://community.spacehubs.africa/forum/space-news/copernicus-data-coming-to-african-institutions

https://gmes4africa.blogspot.com/2020/08/african-institutions-to-benefit-from-free-access-to-copernicus-data.html

https://africanews.space/

https://qz.com/africa/1390183/nasa-picked-senegal-to-learn-about-an-asteroid-in-outer-space/

https://history.nasa.gov/index.html

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/atoms/files/house_approps_agreement_report_as_of_06-30-2020_international.pdf

Tags
#research #spaceinafrica #africa #collaboration #spaceexploration
Judging
This project was submitted for consideration during the Space Apps Judging process.